Bound Unbound: Lin Tianmiao

One of Lin Tianmiao’s clearest recollections of her childhood in China was helping her mother sew clothes for the family. When she returned to China after spending eight years living in New York, she was inspired by this memory to create a technique she calls thread winding, where she winds silk or cotton thread around an object until it is completely covered and ultimately transformed. She used this in one of her first major works called The Proliferation of Thread Winding in 1995, which began her career as an artist and is included in the exhibition. Her use of the technique continues today and can be seen in such recent works as All the Same.

Lin Tianmiao’s paintings, sculptures, and installations have always been about a series of dual tensions. These are frequently played out in her works through contrasts between materials, but they are also evident in binary themes such as male versus female, function versus form, and physical versus psychological experience. Underlying all of these themes is a keen exploration of a physical experience, at times emphasizing the female body. We see this in the works Chatting and Mothers!!!.

Lin is one of only a handful of women artists of her generation born in the 1960s to have emerged during the 1990s when the Chinese art world was coming of age and gaining substantial international recognition. Her works over the past twenty years are as much about her personal journey as an artist as they are about a desire to articulate broader social issues. Through her focus on a female experience, she comments on the enormous social progress made in Chinese society during Mao Zedong’s tenure, yet she hints that some promises remain unfulfilled. Her consistent exploration of these issues, sometimes latent, makes her a significant artist of our time. This exhibition represents Lin Tianmiao’s first major solo exhibition in the United States.

Exhibition Highlights

This exhibition comprises a selection of works spanning the artist’s prolific career from 1995–present. Many of the works have never been seen outside of China and several are new works on view for the first time.

Proliferation of Thread Winding, 1995

One of the highlights of the collection is the artist’s very first mature work, The Proliferation of Thread Winding, from 1995. This work was created shortly after the artist’s return to Beijing after living in New York from 1986–1995 with her husband, the artist Wang GongXin. The installation features a bed pierced by 20,000 needles connected to some 20,000 raw cotton thread balls resting on the floor. A video monitor embedded in the pillow loops an image of the artist’s hands endlessly winding a ball of thread, emphasizing the monotony of domestic labor.

Bound and Unbound, 1997

Another seminal work from this period is Bound and Unbound, from 1997. The artist created this work in reaction to her culture shock of returning to a Beijing that was very changed from the one she left almost a decade previously. Lin felt that many of the societal changes she experienced during this transition home were reflected in the everyday objects around her. In reaction, the artist chose to bind these items with thread using her signature technique of thread winding. This work was first shown in the United States as part of the Inside Out: New Chinese Art exhibition organized by Asia Society in 1998.

Spawn, 2001

The female body, often represented by the artist’s own body, is a reoccurring motif within the artist’s practice over the past decade. Spawn, a full frontal nude self-portrait, is significant as the first moment where Lin’s signature cotton thread balls begin to appear as appendages protruding from the surface of the canvas. These balls are meant to allude to a connection between the internal and external elements of the body. In many of these self-portraits the artist represents herself without hair in an attempt to blur the boundary between genders.

Chatting, 2004

In later works, such as Chatting from 2004, the artist’s focus shifts on the inevitable metamorphosis of the body experienced through the aging process. This new focus reflects the artist’s own experience as a woman acknowledging her fading youth. In this work six full figured female figures are joined in a circle and connected by thin, tenuous threads. An animated soundtrack acts as a metaphor for the intimate relationship between women.

All the Same, 2011

Most recently, the artist has been preoccupied with the internal structure of the body. Her use of bones is best exemplified by the 2011 work All the Same. In this work the artist represents every bone in the human body categorized from largest to smallest. They are wrapped with the thread winding technique, however instead of the raw cotton, these bones are swathed in a brilliant spectrum of silk threads, the ends of which spill to the floor.

About the Artist

Lin Tianmiao was born in Taiyuan Shanxi Province, China, in 1961. She studied Fine Arts at Capital Normal University in Beijing, and then at the Art Students League in New York. For nearly a decade she and her husband, artist Wang GongXin, lived in New York City, where she designed textiles until the couple moved back to Beijing in 1994. Working across installation, sculpture, photography, paper, and video, Lin Tianmiao’s work has been included in numerous local and international exhibitions, such as: Focus: Works on Paper, Long March Space, Beijing, China, 2008; Global Feminisms, Brooklyn Museum, New York, 2007; About Beauty, House of World Cultures, Berlin, Germany, 2005; Mahjong: Works from the Sigg Collection, Kunstmuseum, Bern, Switzerland, 2005; Between Past and Future, International Center of Photography, New York; Asia Society Museum, New York; and Smart Museum, Chicago, 2004.

Credits

Major support for this exhibition is provided by The Coby Foundation, Ltd., Carol and David Appel, Artron, Joleen and Mitchell Julis, and the W. L. S. Spencer Foundation.

Additional support is provided by Will and Helen Little and Sarah Peter. With special thanks to Galerie Lelong.

Support for Asia Society Museum is provided by the Partridge Foundation, a John and Polly
Guth Charitable Fund; Asia Society Contemporary Art Council; Asia Society Friends of Asian
Arts; Arthur Ross Foundation; Sheryl and Charles R. Kaye Endowment for Contemporary Art
Exhibitions; Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Fund; National Endowment for the Humanities;
Hazen Polsky Foundation; New York State Council on the Arts; and the New York City
Department of Cultural Affairs.

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